Getting into a long-running series with such a large fan base can be daunting, but a preview event forDisgaea 7: Vows of the Virtuelessseemed like the perfect opportunity to find out once and for all whether Disgaea was my cup of tea. More importantly, I wanted to know whether a newcomer like myself could gel with it coming in so late.
My knowledge of the series is abysmal, so starting the preview in chapter two without being coaxed in with a tutorial was overwhelming. Combat takes place on an isometric grid with various levels. You can summon multiple units from your roster of characters and dispatch them onto the board, but I had no clue what to do.
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I summoned a range of characters, but maxing out their movement on the first turn didn’t get them close enough to the enemies to attack. I picked up the Prinny I had summoned because it looked cute and found I could throw him further afield, but then he exploded on contact, killing himself and dealing damage to nearby units — which regrettably were my own. Don’t worry about being chucked in the deep end like I was, though. Disgaea 7willhave plenty of tutorials to teach newcomers, as I later discovered.
When the NIS America team realised I was a Disgaea rookie, they gave me a crash course in tactic basics. One top tip was doing a chain of lifting, throwing, and moving to get your units across the board quickly, allowing you to engage the enemy without waiting turn after turn to shuffle across at a snail’s pace.
Once I was in the swing of things, I found the core battle mechanics enjoyable. Yeeting your units across the board, utilising different classes and skills to the best of their ability, and strategising your best offensive are all part of the fun of Disgaea.
Disgaea is brimming with comedy. The back and forth between characters gives you a sense of the kind of humour within the game, with the usual sort of anime tropes coming into play with himbo men trying to flirt with women and characters coming up with silly nicknames for each other. Disgaea embraces the daftness wholeheartedly, with many of your unit rosters having randomly generated names such as Stiff Toothbrush and Orel Hygeine.
“There’s a tonne of ways to play and different features that you can take advantage of, or not if you don’t want to,” NIS America media relations coordinator Nick Odmark tells me, saying the sim was to allow “People to play how they want, catering to both new and veteran fans equally. I think how over the top it is helps a lot. It’s goofy, but not just for goofy’s sake, because they work that into the mechanics too.”
Jumbification is a mechanic new to Disgaea 7 that allows one of your characters to become a giant kaiju-like unit that stands off to the side of the battle board and can attack anyone on the grid. For this mission, we were tackling a jumibified enemy and lots of normal enemies. You must build rage before you can jumbify — earned by your allies being attacked — but it didn’t matter how many units I sent into the thick of it, I just kept losing. It got so bad that I wiped out all my decent units, and when I resorted to jumbifying some of the weaker ones, they dealt zero damage to any attack on the boss. Embarrassing.
A Disagea veteran journalist kindly taught me some new tactics. Sending out three rubbish units to the slaughter — and believe me, they were decimated on the first enemy turn — enabled me to jumbify a good unit on my next move and attack the boss. I didn’t realise I only needed to defeat the boss and could ignore the adds. My jumbified character died shortly afterward, so then I repeated the process. Send out three sacrifices, jumbify the next character, and boom. The boss was an absolute cinch with this plan.
I was so preoccupied with keeping my party alive that I didn’t consider purposefully getting them killed to secure victory. Others at the preview quickly pointed out that you play as a demon. You’re not meant to be nice. Who cares if you kill a few people to get the job done?
“[Jumbification] is just fun,” Odmark says. “It’s very in line with what Disgaea is. There had been talks for a long time about how to make it so characters could attack any of the characters on the stage, and as soon as this was an idea that was getting kicked around, they were like, ‘Yeah, this is great’. It increases player freedom and what players can do, which is what the series is known for.”
We didn’t get to test it out for ourselves, but Disgaea 7 will also include the new item reincarnation feature, similar to the character reincarnation feature that has become a staple in the series. With so many new features to get to grips with, in addition to everything that came before, becoming adept at Disgaea feels like such a monumental task, but Odmark explains that you can take or leave many features, and the game offers plenty of opportunities for you to practice with the different mechanics.
The introduction of new features has not always been well received. Disgaea 6 divided fans, with one of the main issues being the introduction of auto battles. Odmark explains that players felt compelled to take advantage of the feature as it buffed their characters quickly, even if they felt it made the game too easy. Disgaea 7 aims to return to the series' roots, and to that end, while auto-battle is still included, you must manually complete a stage before using it.
Each Disgaea game is standalone, and while there are throwback references and cameos of past Disgaea characters you might miss out on as a newcomer, you don’t need to have played the previous titles. There’s certainly a lot to get your teeth into, but much of it comes down to how you choose to play, and you’ll have plenty of time to practice your tactics. Even while utterly confused and feeling like I was barely treading water in battle, I enjoyed Disgaea 7 because of its sense of humour and intriguing battle mechanics. I can’t wait to see how I find it when given a proper introduction to everything.
This preview was based on a development build of Disgaea 7: Vows of the Virtueless.
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